


In Dreams

by scapegrace74



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eyesex Chronicles, F/M, Frottage, season 1 episode 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:27:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27064132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scapegrace74/pseuds/scapegrace74
Summary: I don’t do Twitter, but roughly once a year I wish I did.  A few weeks back, some clever Outlander writers there came up with the idea of the Eye Sex Chronicles, in which various pre-relationship scenes between Jamie and Claire are re-imagined in a less PG way.  I asked Catrin Writes if I could join the party, and she kindly agreed.  And because I like nothing more than a challenge, the scene I chose is when Jamie comes for Claire after the Redcoat ambush in 1x01.
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Comments: 16
Kudos: 118
Collections: The Eye Sex Chronicles





	In Dreams

Since he was a lad, Jamie had been visited by a recurring dream. In it, he was chasing a figure through a forest. His quarry materialized and dissolved like mist in the dappled light, with limbs as pale as bone and a thundercloud about its head. A _sidhe_ , perhaps, come to deceive him.

The details of the dream shifted, but the ending was always the same. By the bank of a burn, he caught up with the apparition. Staring into her peculiar golden eyes (for it was indeed a woman), the dirt beneath his feet gave way and he fell headlong into a bottomless unknown. Then, he woke.

***

She had to be dreaming, Claire rationalized. Or at least hallucinating. It was the only explanation that fit the facts. Redcoat soldiers wielding muskets. Coarse ruffians speaking Gaelic and tossing her from horseback like a sack of laundry. A Frank doppelganger trying to rape her. Her subconscious must have muddled together her husband’s obsession with Scottish history and the emotional tension of their second honeymoon to produce this elaborate fantasy. Sigmund Freud would rub his hands together with glee.

It didn’t explain, however, why she could feel every nettle and branch as they lashed against her limbs, or why the icy water of the stream she was following numbed her toes. If she was only dreaming, she should stand still and wait for consciousness to return. And if she were hallucinating, she doubted she’d be capable of analyzing her circumstances. She ran because she was afraid to find out what might happen if she was wrong. She ran because it was only a matter of time before her captors gave chase.

***

The ambush by a small patrol of Redcoats ended abruptly in the way of most skirmishes. One minute he was fighting for his life, and the next he was leaning on his sword, sharing a flask of whisky with his brothers in arms.

Dougal had a ribald glint in his eye as he ordered Jamie to round up the Sassenach lass. He thought he’d kept his reaction to her lovely face and near-nakedness well hidden in the dim firelight of the croft, but his uncle’s smirk said otherwise. The men hooted as though it was a great joke - sending the virgin after the mettlesome wench.

It was only as he was retracing his steps to the strath where he’d thrown their captive from Donas’ back that he realized he was injured. The muscles of his shoulder joint were still tender, just as she’d predicted after she’d manipulated the bones back into place. This new pain was sharper and accompanied by the coppery tang of blood. Compounded by the fact that he hadn’t slept or eaten more than a crust of bread in nigh on a day, it was no surprise that his head was feeling light and empty as a summer cloud, with a persistent buzzing sound filling his ears. He persevered in his search, determined to find the lass before continuing on their way. She’d mended him. He at least owed her that much.

An ivory figure dashed between the trees, calling to life his dream. Deja vu, the French called it. The sense that he had lived this moment before, perhaps countless times. Reality tilted sideways, and he could no longer discern what was true and what was illusion. The memory of both his dream and his objective compelled him to give chase. He spurred his horse forward.

***

Damn it! For a figment of her imagination, the tall red-headed Scot was annoyingly persistent. Seumas. Jamie. Mowgli. She’d heard the other men call him by many names, further evidence that this illogical adventure was just an inventive delusion. She’d certainly conjured an attractive antagonist, with his raw potency and soulful blue eyes. He was a bit too chiseled for her taste, and good lord he was gigantesque, but somehow he pulled it off without seeming a brute. Despite the driving rain, the night spent on horseback wrapped together in his plaid hadn’t been unpleasant. Unlike every other person she met in this illusion, he didn’t feel threatening.

He leapt from his horse and was approaching with his arms spread wide, a bloodied sword dangling from one hand in an offhand way. She’d seen men approach unbroken horses in much the same manner. Well, she was no docile mare, willing to accept the bit. If he thought he could subdue her with sonorous words from his pretty lips, he had another thing coming. She lifted her chin. Maybe the way out of this nightmare was to refuse to play along. She spat defiance in his direction, daring him to accost her.

***

Christ, she was beautiful. It hadn’t escaped his notice when they’d first met, despite his dislocated shoulder. But out here in the forest, with smudges of dirt marring her luminous skin and cockleburs matting her hair, she was every cautionary tale he’d learned at his father’s knee. A bewitching siren come to lure his soul to sin.

If her foreign ways and total lack of meekness wasn’t evidence enough that she was the otherworldly creature from his dream, the violent mystery of her agate eyes confirmed it. They were unforgettable, calling to him from across the ages.

Despite his better judgment, he stepped closer, saying something daft about throwing her over his shoulder, as though he’d ever dare demean her in that way. Her breath came into short pants that caused her unbound breasts to rise and fall beneath her thin shift. His fingers twitched, aching to touch her, to confirm that she was real. Some lucid corner of his brain that wasn’t starved of blood and delirious with bloodlust argued that he’d spent many hours pressed up against her very mortal and lovely arse. He ignored it in favour of another step in her direction. Like a mindless beast, he sniffed the air. She smelled like his mate.

***

She’d spent enough time around soldiers returning from the front to recognize the half-crazed look, the dilated pupils, the waves of sexual energy wafting off his skin. The male animal confronted death and procreation with much the same physical response, opposite sides of the same coin.

She should have been frightened by his proximity, but instead she drew back her shoulders and stared directly into his marine gaze, daring him to take another step. Delirious with disorientation and lack of sleep, she flirted with the combustible element that arced between them from the first. She’d never behave so wantonly if she thought for a moment this was reality. It must be a harmless fantasy, made all the more appealing by the artlessness and virility of the man in question.

***

He dropped his sword, a useless defence against temptation. His feet carried him forward of their own volition, answering the urgent summons in her eyes. So close now, skirting the very edge of a precipice. Surely his dream had been a prophecy, a foretelling of a critical juncture in his life. Temptress or Sassenach healer, their paths were destined to cross. There was nothing he could do to deny the hand of fate.

She backed against a tree and his palms came to rest on the ample swell of her hips. He’d never touched a woman so close to her skin. It was intoxicating, warm and supple. She was no longer speaking, watching him instead with those predator’s eyes, wary but unafraid. Her lips were pressed together, and he longed to pry them apart with his tongue, to taste her soul and share his own. Bending slowly forward, the muscle in his beleaguered shoulder seized in sudden pain. Bubbles of dizziness flooded his vision and he slumped forward, momentarily boneless, landing against her lush curves.

***

Christ, he was heavy. One moment she had been certain he was about to kiss her senseless, and then he sagged forward, pinning her between his bloodstained torso and a tree. Her nursing instincts sprang to life as she attempted to assess him. She ran her fingers through his tangled curls and over the abutments of his face, searching for a contusion and finding only tacky blood and prickly stubble. She could feel his deep breaths echoing against her breastbone. He groaned a word in Gaelic that made her wish she understood the tongue.

***

Pressed against her as he was, he marveled at the brilliance of God’s design. She was soft where he was hard, a perfect counterpoint that answered the question his body had been asking since adolescence. He wasn’t ignorant of carnal matters, but nor had he imagined that he could derive such pleasure merely from cleaving his body against another. In his previous trysts with with the young maids of his youth, it had never been so.

Her hands were surprisingly strong as they prodded his skin, seemingly drawn to the places that called out for her touch. They skimmed gently over his shoulders. The lancing pangs had faded like the morning mist, leaving him conscious only of the pulsing ache radiating from his groin. He’d been hard beneath his plaid since fighting the Redcoats, but it had escalated to the brink of pain. Certainly she could feel it, barely clad as she was, but he felt no shame in the knowledge. There was a deeper magic at work here, far outside the laws of propriety.

***

Her fingertips touched the bands of muscle along his flank, having snuck unawares beneath his filthy shirt. Her arms opened to span his torso, no longer pretending to minister to his wounds and instead holding him tight, in case he was considering retreat. It helped that she couldn’t see his face, hidden as it was beyond her hair. She could read the impulse on his dewy skin and through the vibration of his every sinew. He wanted her. Not only because she was a female body close at hand, but on some more fundamental level. She wanted him as well, but that was the dream talking.

***

The thinnest filament held back the raging storm inside of him. What few thoughts he could maintain circled around the inscrutable riddle of her identity. If she truly was the vision from his dream, then what was her purpose? And if she was flesh and blood, then why did she tolerate his trespass? His answer came in the form of a whimper, sneaking from her lips to his ear and straight to his cock. The cord snapped, and he began to rut against her in earnest, the coarse wool of his plaid scratching his swollen flesh. 

_Dhia_ , it was a thousand times greater than any pleasure his own hand could inflict, and yet it was woefully deficient. His hips pressed forward with more force, grinding their bones together, seeking a home inside her warmth. Rather than retreat, she answered with surges of her own. She shuddered and moaned, her nails biting into the scars across his back. He had no language to describe what her body was demanding. He hurtled towards an unknowable point, both hunter and prey in a breathless pursuit. It was bottomless and inescapable, just as in his dream.

***

She’d lost all sense of herself. There was no Claire. No Frank. No everlasting dream about Scottish outlaws. Even the rough bark of the tree against which she was pinned was gone. All that remained was the bitter agony of incompletion and the solid male form that could deliver her from it. She whimpered, tears of frustration leaking from her eyes. She wanted... no, she needed more. More contact. More friction. More of his sublime body that answered every question she asked it wordlessly.

Broad palms slipped down to cup her ass, then lifted her as though she was made of feathers. At that first perfect moment of connection, she cried out. The depths opened up beneath them and her only fear was that she would fall alone. Clamping her thighs around his hips, she circled and writhed directly over the defined prominence of his cock. They both groaned as twin spasms spun outward from where they were pressed together. The hot rush of his eruption warmed her belly, shaking from the force of her own contractions.

The fever crept away as inexplicably as it came, leaving her stippled in gooseflesh and drowning in turmoil. What had just happened? Had she really allowed this stranger, this walking paradox, to bring her to gratification, fully clothed, against the trunk of some bloody Scottish tree? And oh, when would she wake up and return to the mundane struggles of her real life? This, whatever it was, was too much to fathom.

***

At the first twitch of her body after endless moments of utter stillness, he lowered her gently to her feet. He could feel his release trickling down his thigh. Rather than address him, if only to slap him as he deserved, she turned towards the burn. She knelt for a long time, drinking from her cupped palm and splashing water over her face. Doubtless, she was also rinsing his seed from her skin. He burned with remorse. _Sidhe_ or not, he’d treated her contemptibly. 

The rush of blood between his ears was slowing, leaving him shaky and weak. He bent to retrieve his sword and the ground tilted aslant beneath him. By the time she returned from the burn, her eyes demurely focused downwards, he had mounted Donas and was able to lift her over the withers with his good arm. He struggled in vain to keep from pressing up against her, trying to atone for his previous behaviour. They set off in search of Dougal and the others without another word.

***

The further they rode, the more Claire became convinced she had hallucinated the entire thing. The young Scot named Jamie was still kind and solicitous, offering her a slug of whisky and sharing his plaid as the night air grew cold, but he betrayed no proof of their intimate encounter. Along with everything else that was happening, it was too much to contemplate, so she pushed it to the back of her mind.

Well past midnight, she felt his bulk behind her slide sideways as he started to topple to the ground.

“Stop! Help, he’s going over!”

Leaping to the ground and ordering the other men about like a petty general, she poured whisky into the newly discovered wound that pierced the trapezius muscle. Yet more evidence, if she was looking for it, that their union in the forest had all been in her head. Who could please a lover while bleeding out from a gunshot?

Jamie sputtered back to consciousness beneath her hands.

“Welcome back,” she commented pertly.

***

The blank screen in front of his eyes reassembled around the familiar faces of Murtagh, Dougal, Angus and the others, peering down at him in the gloom. He must have fallen deep asleep while they fled to Leoch. His memories were foggy, but he recalled a dream of chasing a mysterious woman through a wooded strath, catching her by the edge of a burn, and then... well, it wouldn’t be the first time his sleeping mind brought him gratification, although generally not on horseback.

“I’m all right. Just a wee bit dizzy,” he tried to convince the assemblage, eager to get back on his horse. They couldn’t afford a delay.

“You're not all right,” an oddly familiar English voice pronounced. Without waiting for him to respond, she launched into a tirade.

“Couldn’t you tell how badly you were bleeding? You're lucky you're not dead, brawling and fighting and throwing yourself off horses.”

He stared up in disbelief at her fiercely beautiful face, the one he recognized from his dreams.

She was here.

**Author's Note:**

> In case anyone is wondering, Mowgli = mo ghille (my boy). Rudyard Kipling’s mother was Scottish. 😉


End file.
